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Protecting "the knot of all Christian society": the Elizabethan Settlement and Anglicanism's pastoral generosity

Yesterday, historian John McCafferty Tweeted that #OTD in 1587, the Puritan Hugh Gray, of Trinity College, Cambridge, preached a sermon against a range of practices in the Church of England - the "Jewish music" used in the liturgy, the superstitious observance of Christmas - and the acceptance of 'crypto-papists' within the Church's life.  As a result of the sermon, Gray was brought before the university's Vice-Chancellor to be admonished.

Railing against 'crypto-papists', of course, was a Puritan past-time.  Mindful that the Elizabethan Settlement was by 1587 less than thirty years old, and that many clergy and laity in the English Church had conformed under Mary, attacking 'crypto-papists' was an assault on the ordinary Christian practice and piety of a majority within the Church.  It was, furthermore, an attack on the very idea of 'conformity', that participation in the common life and worship of the parish defined membership of the Church, rather than criteria established by the 'Godly'.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Hooker directly challenged the 'Disciplinarian' demand to exclude 'papists' from the English Church.  Warning against "imposing upon the Church a burden to enter farther into men's hearts and to make a deeper search of their consciences than any Law of God or reason of man enforceth", Hooker instead urged a gracious generosity:

[they] should be cherished according to the merciful examples and precepts whereby the gospel of Christ hath taught us towards such to show compassion, to receive them with lenity and all meekness, if any thing be shaken in them to strengthen it not, not to quench with delays and jealousies that feeble smoke of conformity which seemeth to breathe from them, but to build wheresoever there is any foundation, to add perfection unto slender beginnings, and that as by other offices of piety even so by this very food of life which Christ hath left in his Church not only for preservation of strength but also for relief of weakness (LEP V.68.9).

Such gracious generosity was integral to the Elizabethan Settlement, an expression of Elizabeth's desire to reconcile the Realm to a reformed Church of England.  Hence the direction in the Elizabethan Injunctions against disturbing the peace of the Church and the Realm through agitation such as that undertaken by Gray:

Item, because in all alterations, and specially in rites and ceremonies, there happen discords amongst the people, and thereupon slanderous words and railings, whereby charity, the knot of all Christian society, is loosed; the queen's majesty being most desirous of all other earthly things, that her people should live in charity both towards God and man, and therein abound in good works, wills and straitly commands all manner her subjects to forbear all vain and contentious disputations in matters of religion, and not to use in despite or rebuke of any person these convicious words, papist or papistical heretic, schismatic or sacramentary, or any suchlike words of reproach. But if any manner of person shall deserve the accusation of any such, that first he be charitably admonished thereof; and if that shall not amend him, then to denounce the offender to the ordinary, or to some higher power having authority to correct the same.

 As David Starkey notes, the purpose of the Elizabethan Settlement was not to reconcile "serious, theologically literate" Roman Catholics to the reformed Church, but to encourage a culture of popular conformity (and in this - as Judith Maltby shows in Prayer Book and People - it was incredibly successful).  To this end, gracious generosity was essential.

Something more is at work here, however, than just pragmatism and historical contingency.  Recognising that pastoral practice shaped by gracious generosity was necessary to nurture and preserve "charity, the knot of all Christian society" in the realm of England, allowed what would become Anglicanism to embody an apostolic call to peace and patience.  Yesterday at Evensong, thoughts on the Tweet by John McCafferty seemed to cohere with the second lesson, from 1 Thessalonians 5:

And be at peace among yourselves. Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly, comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men.

Unruly agitation disturbs the peace of the Church and threatens the quiet generosity which should characterise pastoral relationships with the faint-hearted, with the weak, with all.  The gracious generosity of the Elizabethan Settlement was not mere Erastianism, an incipient Latitudinarianism.  It was a foundation for parish life and pastoral ministrations shaped not by sectarian urges but, as Hooker states, "the merciful examples and precepts [of] the gospel of Christ"; parish life and pastoral ministrations through which a society was nurtured in communion with Christ, oriented - with profound failures, yet seriously and meaningfully - towards "charity, the knot of all Christian society". 

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